The Decade in News

Shots fired! In a Rolling Stone interview, Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne had some harsh words for the Arcade Fire, the next generation in life-affirming alt-rock, alleging that they treated people "like shit": "They have good tunes, but they're pricks, so fuck 'em." On the AF's website, frontman Win Butler responded, saying that the Arcade Fire are not, in fact, pricks, and that Coyne doesn't really know them like that anyway: "I am not sure Wayne is the best judge (based on seeing us play at a couple of festivals) if we are righteous, kind and goodhearted people." A few months later, the great indie feud of '09 seemed to end when Coyne apologized, telling Entertainment Weekly that he felt "really bad about it," but subsequent comments found Coyne pointing out that it was just one man's opinion and that he was just saying what was on his mind. We may not have heard the last of this. --TB

February 8

M.I.A. Owns the Grammys

Photo by Kathryn Yu

At the 51st annual Grammy Awards, an extremely pregnant M.I.A., dressed like the world's flyest ladybug, strutted onstage to sing a few seconds of "Paper Planes" before sharing the stage with the four biggest rap stars in the world (that'd be Kanye West, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and T.I.), as they ran through a ferocious rendition of "Swagga Like Us", the summit meeting that Kanye had built from a sample of M.I.A.'s voice. This was the surreal culmination of Maya Arulpragasam's unlikely mainstream invasion. As early as spring 2008, Rihanna was covering "Paper Planes" in her opening set on Kanye's Glow in the Dark tour. But the song didn't quite explode until it soundtracked the trailer for the stoner comedy Pineapple Express. "Paper Planes" subsequently peaked at #4 on Billboard's Hot 100, and the terminally unhip Grammy folks, in a rare example of clear thinking, nominated it for Record of the Year. It didn't win, but that's the Grammys' problem, not Maya's. --TB

February 18

Touch and Go Shuts Down Distribution

In indie and punk, Touch and Go is about as beloved as an institution can get. Since its 1981 inception, the Chicago-based label helped introduce the world to Negative Approach, Big Black, Butthole Surfers, the Jesus Lizard, Urge Overkill, Girls Against Boys, Dirty Three, the Monorchid, Blonde Redhead, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and TV on the Radio, to name just a few. And as a distributor, Touch and Go worked closely with key independent labels like Merge, Kill Rock Stars, and Drag City. But none of that could stop Touch and Go from falling victim to the sharp changes in the music business. Earlier this year, the label announced that they'd shut down their distribution arm and would not be releasing any new music, a sad moment for indie rock and a tremendous blow to the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of independent music. --TB

March 10

Billy Corgan Goes to Washington

When Billy Corgan spoke to Congress, he wasn't talking up some pet charitable cause. Rather, he was defending the proposed Ticketmaster/LiveNation monster-merger, an enterprise made even sketchier by the fact that Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff is also Corgan's manager. But then, given Corgan's history this decade, the fact that he found himself in such a questionable situation wasn't so surprising. Over the past few years, Corgan has conducted himself like some combination of over-the-top movie villain and actual crazy person. The Smashing Pumpkins put out the awful Zeitgeist in 2007, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Since then, Corgan has unleashed endless rambling blog missives, soundtracked WWF spots, publicly squired dippy reality-show chick Tila Tequila, and hired a 19-year-old to replace departed Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. Actually, that last one is sort of cool. --TB

March 26

Blender Shuts Down

When Blender magazine announced that they'd published their last issue, we lost one of America's biggest music magazines. A few months later, we lost another when Vibe shut down, though another company later bought that title and announced plans to relaunch it as a quarterly. Rolling Stone and Spin have suffered layoffs, beloved smaller magazines like Punk Planet and No Depression have had to shut down, and a few companies continue to snatch up alternative weeklies, crushing the spark of individuality from their pages. It's been a rough decade for the print any way you slice it, and music publications have had it extra hard. Like the troubled newspaper industry, they've suffered from nose-diving ad sales, ever-expanding media options, and the movement of the word online. So those who grew up with print and remember holding paper in their hands while reading about music are finding options seriously diminished. --TB

May 26

Brooklyn Art Pop Breaks Through

In the second half of the decade, the ubiquity of Brooklyn indie rock became such a cliché that it wasn't even worth making fun of anymore. There were so many bands, so many scenes, so much cross-pollination; if you were in an indie rock band with some experimental leanings, you packed it up and moved to Brooklyn-- end of story. With so much going on, eventually something had to break through to a broader public, and in 2009, three highly original and distinctive bands with Brooklyn roots found a wider audience at roughly the same time. Abetted by stellar reviews, good live shows, and the ambition to reach people, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, and Animal Collective (yeah, only one of them has lived in the borough for some time, but A.C. is Brooklyn down from way back) in 2009 all reached impressive levels of popularity for such quirky art-pop bands. All three played "Late Show With David Letterman" in 2009, for example. But the most striking example of arty indie's new commercial fortunes was the appearance of Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest in Billboard's Top 10 the week of its release. Sure, pop albums don't sell like they used to, but just moving 33,000 copies in one week of a record bearing the name Veckatimest is a sign that serious changes are afoot. --MR

May 29

Phil Spector Found Guilty of Murder

Phil Spector created an entire widescreen style of recording music while making hits like the Ronettes' "Be My Baby". But his outlandish legend-- punctuated by odd tales of guns and violence-- increasingly encroached upon his musical legacy until it finally swallowed it all together when he was accused and eventually convicted of murdering actress Lana Clarkson. After a 2007 mistrial, the producer was found guilty of murder in the second degree on May 29, 2009-- currently 69 years old, he will not be eligible for parole until age 88. --RD

Summer

Dreams, Temperature, and Tape Hiss: A Genre Is Born

As the decade was ending, a new sound was reaching a critical mass of online hype. This music was home-recorded and cheap-sounding, but the approach, unlike lo-fi past, was much more sing-along pop than noisy punk. Lyrics talked about summertime, childhood memories, and varying states of consciousness, but it was sometimes hard to make them out through the warbly din. Musical antecedents were the radio-ready tunes of the Beach Boys and girl-groups with touches of 1980s new wave, Italo disco, shoegaze, and atmospheric 50s guitar instrumentals-- all sounds bleeding into each other thanks to the crude production. Combining these elements, artists like Neon Indian, Washed Out, Memory Tapes, Nite Jewel, Ducktails, and Toro Y Moi were taking the naïveté and focus on sensation of more recent Animal Collective, giving the music a near-danceable pulse, and setting their creations free to float through the indie blogosphere like a sleepy kid lolling in an innertube. Dream-beat? Glo-fi? Chillwave? The jury's still out, but it seems a safe bet that the best of this music will outlive whatever genre name is put to it. --MR

June 25

The King of Pop Passes

Michael Jackson had pretty much laid low ever since 2005, when he was acquitted of charges that he sexually abused a child. The lengthy court case was deeply humiliating for the already damaged superstar, and disclosures during the proceeding confirmed in public what people had long suspected: the guy at the very least had some seriously disturbing perceptions about appropriate behavior around children. So for a while after, he disappeared, at least as much as one of the most famous people in the world can: he decamped to Bahrain, avoiding fans and detractors alike, and didn't release any new music.

Given his distance from the public eye, it came as a surprise in March 2009 when it was announced that Jackson would be performing a series of shows-- first 10, later expanded to 50-- at London's O2 Arena, and would then retire. The shows sold out quickly, and there was speculation that Jackson wasn't in shape enough, either physically or mentally, to pull them off. "Will the shows happen?" was the Jackson drama of the moment on the morning of June 25, but then everything changed. Reports emerged that Jackson had collapsed, that he had suffered cardiac arrest, and then, unbelievably, that he had died.

Because he had been such a central figure in pop culture for 40 years, it was at first hard for people to wrap their heads around it. Michael Jackson dead? How? Two months later, after a global expression of grief (it seems likely that a pop star will never unite people again the way Jackson did) and a public memorial at the Staples Center, and the world had its answer: a toxic combination of prescription drugs including propofol, a powerful anesthetic used to put people under for surgery. The death was ruled a homicide. --MR

September 9

The Beatles Say Goodbye to the CD, Hello to Video Games

With the widely hyped release of their remastered catalog on CD, the first such treatment the records had received since their initially digital issue in 1987, the band most responsible for pushing the idea of the "rock LP" symbolically closed the door on the album-oriented format known as the compact disc. But while the reissues come with a whiff of death, the ultimate baby boomer band are simultaneously revitalizing their legacy with the interactive game The Beatles: Rock Band, which hit stores the same day. At press time, the Beatles remain the biggest holdouts in the music industry's current iTunes-led digital marketplace, as none of their music is legally available as downloads. Once that's finally sorted out, the only question left is one from the record geek peanut gallery: vinyl reissues, anyone? --RD

September 1

Kurt Cobain and the Guitar Hero Flap

When the Guitar Hero franchise blew up, think-pieces lauded Activision for reanimating a dead music industry. Maybe the game company took that talk a little too literally. When Guitar Hero 5 dropped, the game included Kurt Cobain as an "unlockable" avatar, which means that you can actually play as Cobain, forcing him to sing Bon Jovi and Billy Idol songs. The day after the game came out, a YouTube video of him doing just that made the rounds, and outrage predictably ensued. On her Twitter, Cobain widow Courtney Love protested the inclusion and claimed that she'd sue Activision, while ex-bandmates Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic issued a statement expressing dismay and asking Activision to re-lock the character. But Guitar Hero CEO Dan Rosensweig told NME that he'd secured rights to Cobain's image for this use, implying that he'd paid Love for it. More drama is expected. --TB

September 13

Kanye West Doesn't Care About Taylor Swift

If there were an award for televised freakouts, Kanye West would win every time. But no Kanye Moment, with the possible exception of his post-Katrina Bush bash, incited public rage quite like the 2009 VMAs, when he told country starlet Taylor Swift, to her face, that Beyoncé deserved the award that she was in the process of accepting. Taylor reacted like Kanye had strangled her dog onstage, still looking shaken when Beyoncé inevitably brought her back out a couple of hours later. Kanye held back tears while apologizing on "The Jay Leno Show" the next night, which didn't stop two different presidents-- Barack Obama and former president Jimmy Carter-- from criticizing his actions. --TB